Polling as a communication mechanism for network management and operations is encumbered by transactions that do not yield useful or actionable information in each cycle, thus delaying the system's responsiveness to significant events. Event-driven procedures can be used to reduce response delay by initiating information exchange only when needed. However, these procedures incur the disadvantage of the need to manually configure the associations between the producers and consumers of events and services.
Publish-subscribe mechanisms enhance event-driven procedures by providing decoupling, based on type and service abstractions, between producers and consumers. However, publish-subscribe mechanisms have the disadvantage of potentially overloading subscribers with published events and information, which are not always relevant to a subscriber's tasks.